The Arkansas was
the oldest battleship in the U.S.
Navy at the start of the war, with a design going back to 1908. She
would
doubtless have already been scrapped but for the increase in
international
tensions in the late 1930s. She had been modernized with deck
armor but
was otherwise completely obsolete. She served most of the war in the
Atlantic and was not committed to the
Pacific until November 1944.

Arkansas'
older sister, class namesake Wyoming,
had been converted to a target ship before hostilities broke out, and
she was not deemed worth converting back to a battleship.